#insights

Interview with Ajit Jaokar

We talk to Ajit Jaokar about his entrepreneurship career and academic research relating to IoT, predictive analytics and mobility. In 2015, Ajit was included in top 16 influencers (Data Science Central), Top 100 blogs (KDnuggets), Top 50 (IoT central).

His current research focus is on applying data science algorithms to IoT applications. This includes Time series, sensor fusion and deep learning(mostly in R/Apache Spark). This research underpins his teaching at Oxford University (Data Science for Internet of Things) and ‘City sciences’ program at University of Madrid. Ajit is also the Director of the newly founded AI/Deep Learning labs for Future cities at UPM(University of Madrid) His book is included as a course book at Stanford University for Data Science for Internet of Things.

Which 4 global companies do you admire for their use of data science and why?

To be successful in AI .. we need insightful people, data and vision. In that sense, the best companies are the larger ones. I would say.. Google, Microsoft, Facebook and IBM I would also add Nvidia.

What are the biggest challenges to companies who want to add data analytics to their digitization roadmap?

The lack of skilled people and the availability of data(to train their models).

Google CEO Sudner Pichai says we've entered an "AI-first" era? Do you think the AI hype is justified and why?

AI is hyed in the sense of 'robots taking on the world' - but aI is very much real. So, there are many applications for AI which are happening now and hence not part of hype.

Which AI startups do you find most exciting at the moment?

h2o.ai (while not strictly a startup) is exciting for both its tech and its open source approach.